|
|
|
Links
|
 BASIC File Index 
Description: An older site with a nice collection of simple games that you might find interesting. It was created by Mark Reed who first featured the BFI on his Doddle Software site, way back in 1997. This site was meant to tailor to all versions of BASIC, but only QBasic and QuickBasic programs are available.
Unique Features: An interesting collection of programs ("Snot Shooter", "Magazine -- "where you control the publishing of your own magazine", etc.)...but most of them are no longer available. Only the programs at the bottom of the list are still online.
 Abstract Productions 
Description: Mark Hall's site, and home to his one-man programming company Abstract Productions. Mark is behind the incredible ARC RPG series, which has been accoladed for its depth and storytelling. The ARC Legacy looks great!
Unique Features: On this site, you'll find screenshots, information and downloads of the ARC RPGs, as well as a few side projects like Circuitz and Blorp Zingwag: Elf Detective.
 Mandelbrot Dazibao 
Description: A very interesting site dedicated to *VERY* advanced graphical techniques, ranging from Fractals to Mandelbrot Fractions to Bresenham formulas. All of these techniques are accomplished in QuickBasic, and they are all extremely impressive.
Unique Features: This site is rich in screenshots and custom-generated graphics, which are accompanied by a bounty source code. There are several custom tutorials here, all well-written, with lots of theory that is backed up by math and source code. Included is a plethora of information on high-resolution and high-color mode programming in QB. What the guys at the Dazibao have done with graphics in QB blows my mind, and is certainly worth a look! Download one of their many graphics demos, and be sure to read the tutorials if you want to be enlightened.
 Tom's Programs 
Description: Tommy McBurney's site, which is devoted to chess programs. One of them is Deep Basic, which was programmed in QuickBasic 4.5. This includes many AI concepts and a "10,500 move opening book database", though this program is still not nearly as smart as commercial Chess programs.
Unique Features: As far as QB content, Deep Basic is it, though you'll find many other Chess programs here written in other languages as well as information about Tom's collection of electronic chessboards. Deep Basic is probably the best Chess program I've ever seen in QB, though there really haven't been very many attempts.
 Tsugumo's Site O' Junk
Description: Tsugumo is an amazing artist with a passion for anime and pixel art. He was once all the rage in the QB world for his amazing RPG demos The Game and Untitled. Though they were never finished, their amazing graphics and writing inspired many other QB programmers to take up RPG projects. Additionally, Tsugumo's famous "So You Wanna Be A Pixel Artist, Huh?" tutorial series is the Bible for QB artists of all skill levels. This guy's influence on the QB community is simply amazing.
Unique Features: As far as QB content goes on this site, there's not much. Just the two above mentioned RPG demos are for download (in the old and more "stylish" version of the site). You can also see tons of Tsugumo's original art work here, but the heart of the site is the Pixel Art tutorial, which I have visited about a million times and I can't stop raving about. There is also a link to Pixelation, a message forum community of talented pixel artists that was founded by Tsugumo and Frozen Emu. Since this is not much of a QB site, I'm going to hold back on the rating (links are rated based on QB content after all), but this site is definitely a MUST SEE for anyone with eyes.
 2000 QB Gaming Gold Awards Page
Description: The first iteration of V Planet's QB Gaming Gold Awards occurred in 2000 as a joint venture between Future Software and the budding QB magazine and reviews site. Since the 2000 G.G. Awards were the first, all QB games that were ever released to that point were considered for awards. As a result, the contest was dominated by QB classics like Milo Sedlacek's Monospace and Angelo Mottola's Wetspot 2.
Unique Features: The 2000 Gaming Golds site has information and screenshots of all nominated programs and does a great job explaining why each program (or programmer) deserves the nomination. This site covers the most important QB games released since the dawn of the QB Community until 2000, and will forever be the most important of the Gaming Gold contests.
 2001 QB Gaming Gold Awards page
Description: A mini-site hosting V Planet's 2001 QB Gaming Gold Awards, where various QB games released in 2001 competed for prizes including Best RPG, Best Gaming Babe, Best Programming Team and Game of the Year. DarkDread's famed RPG Mysterious Song took many of the top prizes, and was named game of the year in 2001.
Unique Features: This is a nicely-organized site with lots of information about all the nominees, complete with screenshots. It also has tallies of the winners and links to the sites of all the nominees. A well-made site and a great time capsule. Someday when your kids ask "What was the QB community like in 2001?" you can say "Well, why don't you take a look at the 2001 QB Gaming Gold Awards Page?"
 Tarak's Tower
Description: Small site that was home to its own RPG programming tutorial series. Also has a tiny bit of information on an unfinished RPG called VADL and a tile editor called TTEdit.
Unique Features: The three RPG programming tutorials are nice, and worth a read if you're a newbie trying to make your first RPG. Other than that, this site is pretty empty.
 Everything QBasic
Description: At first this site looks like it's got a lot of great stuff on it, but then you realize that all of its content is directly linked to other sites. Not just copied and reformatted--Everything QBasic directly links to other sites for everything it has.
Unique Features: The Tips page is Acid Works', the Tutorials are Simply QB's, the Files page is broken, as are the FAQs, the Guestbook, the Discussion Board and the rest of the site. The only thing good here is the Tutorials section, which, as I already mentioned, doesn't even belong to this site.
 Julian and Alex's BASIC Page 
Description: Site by two newbies with three downloadable programs: Mad Libs and two PLAY statement songs, one to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and the other to play "The Blue Danube".
Unique Features: Just those three programs and that's it.
 CLS: QBasic Ezine For New Programmers
Description: "In case you are wondering, CLS is one of the most basic commands in BASIC programming. It tells the computer to clear the screen. I don't have any metaphorical reasons for naming this e-zine CLS. It just sonded like a hell of an idea. Metaphorically speaking, it could be a call to clear all the old ideas you have about programming out and put the new ideas in, but I'm not that metaphorical."
Unique Features: This "Ezine" amounts to a few small beginners' tutorials and two VERY simple programs for download. There's also a Call for Columnists, asking people to contribute to this ill-fated Ezine. Too bad nobody ever did.
 LockJaw Productions
Description: A site by a Ryan Brown and Ernie Gerber, a 13 year old and a 12 year old. Don't scoff at their ages; I was just barely thirteen when I started my QB site.. But do scoff at their site. It's not very good.
Unique Features: There's nothing useful here. There's a one-sentence description of an upcoming game called Asteroth that was 2% complete when abandones, three RPGs to download. There's also a small top sites list here: "The LockJaw Productions Top 7 RPG Sites", but it was never successful. At least it has a nice layout for something made by such young programmers.
 QBasic Headquarters 
Description: J.D. Hugger's QBasic Headquarters has unfortunately become a victim of free web servers.
Unique Features: This site has been completely deleted except for its opening "entrance" page. Will it ever return? It's HIGHLY doubtful. So why do I link to it? Hey, you never know. If FreeHomepages.com ever decides to restore the account, I'll be the first one with a link to it!
 Eric Rhodes' QBasic Page
Description: Tiny site offering two large zip files with over 50 QB programs each. I don't know if they were originals or just redistributions of other people's freeware programs.
Unique Features: This site is worthless, because the links to both zip files are now broken.
 VR Chocha 
Description: Site of 3D graphics enthusiasts who use QBasic to make calculations for 3D drawings they make in VRML: "As you will have noticed by yourself, our Basic programs do not use any graphical instruction, such as SCREEN, LINE or PSET. All the graphics are managed by your VRML browser or modeling software. They're much better for that, why should we deny it? But the Basic listings are much quicker to calculate the coordinates, we do not pretend more."
Unique Features: There is quite a bit of information on how to calculate 3D figures with QB, and then to convert them to VRML for the actual rendering. It's an interesting way to generate graphics, and back in 1997 this technique was probably a time saver. These days, though, 3D modelling software has progressed to the point where calculation features are built in.
 Q-Basics
Description: A QB downloads page that unfortunately linked all of its files on other sites that have since gone down or moved.
Unique Features: All the files here are from QBasic.com or Acid Works, and are no longer available at their old locations. The guy who made this site also thinks that the language is called QBasics with an "s". Not worth your time, unless you want to take a ride on the dead links express.
 John's Domain
Description: Little tiny site with a few programs to download. None of them are original. They're all pretty simple game demos.
Unique Features: Source code for basketball, boxing, a card game, a raycasting demo and 3D pong are here, among others.
 Straumland
Description: Multi-language programming page with five QBasic graphics demos available for download. They are: Starfield, Tunnel, Dots, Globe and BallVector.
Unique Features: Unfortunately, the programs don't come with source code: "These programs has been compiled to executables due to portability. Not everyone keeps an updated version of Qbasic around." These are simple techniques, and not including source code makes them pretty useless to QB programmers who want to learn. These graphics examples have been replicated all over the QB community, so why choose these source-less versions when there are many other better versions out there? Sure beats me.
 QBasic / QuickBasic Programming Corner
Description: Cheng Ning's "New" QBasic / QuickBasic Programming Corner. Once one of the earliest largest and QBasic sites on the Internet has since deprecated into a collection of dead links and broken images. This site was one of the first in the QB Community that featured dynamic content updatable by the users through a series of forms and FTP services.
Unique Features: There is a lot of text left on this site, but most of the downloadable content has become inaccessable in recent years. Cheng Ning's site was hosted on a variety of different free web servers, and only the base HTML documents at Fortune City are still available. The "New" Programming Corner once had a lot to offer, including a large collection of downloads, a lot of tutorials, challenges and dynamic content like mailing lists, guestbooks, polls and message boards.
 Ray's Homepage
Description: A personal interests site with a large QBasic section. Includes many tutorials with a lot of source code on various simple QB techniques, which are then used in more advanced programs that demonstrate their usefulness.
Unique Features: There are about 15 long, well-written in-depth tutorials here, as well as several dozen programs for download. Not the most interesting programs, mind you, but they can be useful to learn from.
 Nuke Software Inc.
Description: Home of Nuclear Software Inc., which apparently changed its name to "Orbital Software". This site was last updated in 1997 and has versions of old favorites including Tetris, Bomberman and Russian Roulette. There are also slightly more unique games like Heaven Vs. Hell, a space shooter, and some music renditions from Phantom of the Opera.
Unique Features: There isn't much here, but the downloads section is a nice blast from the past; most of these games were released in about 1996 before the widespread availability of ASM libraries and such. Unfortunately, that also makes them pretty unimpressive...
 Programmer's Tech Shop 
Description: The Programmer's Tech Shop BBS is "a TBBS bulletin board system that was up and running in the early 1990's. As a small-time, two-line BBS based out of Toledo, Ohio, we boasted the fact that we had callers (and yes, even subscribers!) from as far away as Israel."
Unique Features: This site's main page is a long article talking about the old Programmer's Tech Shop BBS. Also here is a large collection of rare GWBASIC, Power Basic and QuickBasic programs, utilities and libraries that were once posted on the BBS. There are also a number of tutorials here too. You can find programs that do things like create Drop-down menus in QB or make custom fonts. There are also a lot of QB 4.5 and PDS 7.1 libraries available here.
 QBasic World
Description: Tiny site by Andrew DiMichele, with five original programs including a Pong game and a Nibbler clone. There's also a "funny" Poetry Generator program.
Unique Features: This site is miniscule and abandoned. It has a beginners' tutorial, the aforementioned programs in the "Archive" section and a Challenge: "Your first challenge is to draw a face using nothing but the CIRCLE function and then make the face bounce around the screen and fade in-and-out of colors." Nobody ever entered.
 Joe's QBasic Repository
Description: Site updated a couple times in 1999 that never got off the ground. It has a small collection of games and utilities to download, none of them original.
Unique Features: Everything here was taken from either QBasic.com or Acid Works. Most of the links are broken too. This site claims to have tutorials too, but they are exactly the same as his list of Utility programs.
 Cube-E Josh's QB Site
Description: Just starting QB site by a guy named Josh. Here you can find out about his Tetris game with a twist, called Ludatris or his impressive graphics demo, Ghostcube.
Unique Features: First off, this site does not load properly in anything but Internet Explorer. It has a cool background beat (one of the few sites with background music that I've actually liked) and uses quite a bit of flash. Currently, there's not much here. If it grows, I'll certainly up the score!
|
|
Programs
